We started working in IT as we prefer computers over people.
Locking yourself in the basement and coding can get you only so far. The blessing of being isolated from your customers has a profound curse – you don’t know who your customers are.
What are their problems? What do they like about your work? What do they hate about your work? The worst part – all the input you get, is received by and filtered to you by someone else.
By a product manager. Your colleague. Or even AI bots these days.
You will work on important items for somebody else. The best you can do is to work within that limited scope. What about a bigger picture?
It’s like you’ve been telling somebody else’s story, and completely ignored your own life’s story.
Talk to your users.
There’s this unwritten rule between IT professionals:
Support is bad. Working on projects or developing new features is perceived as the holy grail of development. I get it – it’s exciting to deliver something new. But then again, how do you know what you’re building is useful? Or is what you built being used at all?
There’s no point in writing documentation if no one can find it.
Having direct contact with your users gives direct feedback on their experience. Their wishes. Their struggles.
Use it to your advantage.
Since becoming Senior Platform Engineer I’ve been doing a lot of support.
It’s one thing to build the development platform. It’s a different thing how users want to use the platform.
Sometimes, the platform is at fault, but users think they’ve done something wrong. This leads to endless frustration as they try to fix the issue.
Sometimes someone is very keen, but just can’t find the right information.
Oftentimes, a quick call can prevent days of async communication.
By directly talking to your customers, you build much more than their persona. You build relationships and empathy for their day-to-day tasks, and you grow as a person and developer.
It’s a win-win.
How do you get feedback from your users? Join discussion!